Private Lies (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Bobbie Ann Mason was born near Mayfield, Kentucky, in 1940 and grew up on a dairy farm her father owned in rural Kentucky. Her early experiences in the country provided many of the settings for her later fiction. Mason attended the University of Kentucky, graduating in 1962. She left Kentucky immediately and moved to New York, where she earned a living writing for a variety of fan magazines. After several years of this work, she completed a master's degree program at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966. She then earned a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut in 1972, writing her dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov. Her early work was primarily academic and critical; however, she soon began writing and publishing short stories.

After submitting some twenty stories to The New Yorker magazine, Mason's short story "Offerings" was accepted in 1980. Mason published many short stories in prestigious magazines and journals over the next several years, and by 1982, her short story collection Shiloh and Other Stories was published, and her reputation as a master of the short story was established. Mason followed this book with several novels: In Country (1985); Spence + Lila (1988) and Feather Crowns (1993). In 1989, In Country, probably Mason's most famous book, was made into a major motion picture, directed by Norman Jewison, and starring Bruce Willis.

Mason published a collection of her earlier short stories, Midnight Magic, in 1998, as well as Clear Springs: A Memoir in 1999. She returned to short fiction in her 2001 collection, Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail. In 2003 she wrote a biography of Elvis Presley, published by Penguin as part of the publisher's short biography series. Over the years, Mason has won a wide variety of awards for her work including an Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award, Southern Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as many nominations for other awards.

Mason generally sets her fiction in the western Kentucky of her youth. Her characters are most often working-class people, caught in various kinds of personal and cultural transitions, their lives dangling between where they have been and where they are going. "Private Lies" shares these characteristics. The story appeared in The Atlantic magazine in March, 1983. The story also was part of the collection Love Life, published in 1989.

Mason's continued productivity as a writer, as well as the ongoing critical attention her work receives, has earned her a position as a major American writer.